WINTERTHUR.- In his portraits and studio photographs, the US artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya blends sensual intimacy with visual precision. Working within the studio’s protected, private space, he constructs layered compositions through encounters with people from his creative and queer communities. By laying bare the act of photographing, Sepuya draws viewers into a sensuous tension between looking and desire.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982) is known for the distinctive visual arrangements he creates in his studio, shaped through intimate encounters with friends, lovers, and close companions. His works insist on a queer and Black subject position in photography, without ever fully yielding to the gaze. Through the deliberate placement of mirrors, fabrics, and studio props, Sepuya stages an interplay of exposure and concealment: bodies and gazes are reflected, refracted, and fragmented; multiplied and woven into new configurations. Nothing is altered in post-production: each photograph is carefully composed in the studio and captured as a single exposure.

Sepuya places bodies, gazes, and objects into a dynamic web of relations. His photographs are not made in isolation, but through friendships, encounters, and shared working processes. The studio is therefore not merely a site of photographic production, but a social space. In this way, Sepuya unsettles the conventions of portrait photography while continually renegotiating the conditions under which photographic visibility is produced. The camera, so often visible within the frame, ultimately redirects the gaze back towards us, drawing viewers into an artistic vision that tactically navigates – and subtly shifts – dominant norms and visual regimes.

Fotomuseum Winterthur is presenting Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s first major solo exhibition in Switzerland. Bringing together both early and recent bodies of work alongside extensive ephemera drawn from the artist’s personal archive, the exhibition unfolds across three spaces: Studio, Archive, and Dark Room. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Sprengel Museum Hannover and co-curated by Christopher A. Nixon for Fotomuseum Winterthur.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982 in San Bernardino, California/USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. He is Associate Professor in Media Arts at the University of California San Diego.

Sepuya received a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (2004) and an MFA in Photography from the University of California Los Angeles (2016). He has exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including at Nottingham Contemporary (2024), the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2019), Foam in Amsterdam (2018), and MoMA in New York (2018). His works are held in major international collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, Tate London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Stedelijk Museum, among others. Sepuya is represented by Bortolami (New York), DOCUMENT (Chicago | Lisbon), Galerie Peter Kilchmann (Zurich and Paris), and Vielmetter Los Angeles (Los Angeles).

Exhibition Spaces

Studio

For nearly two decades, the sites of photography – whether home, residency, or artist studio – have been central to the development of Sepuya’s artistic practice. The selection of works traces the development of his distinctive visual language, alongside the emergence of key elements, artistic methods, and recurring figures that converge in his layered compositions. Sepuya’s studio functions as a social space – a site of queer and creative networks, shaped by friendship and community. Trust, intimacy, curiosity, and desire shape the encounters in the studio space and within the photographic arrangement that Sepuya often keeps visible in the image. The artist himself slips into different roles, placing himself in the frame as the arranging hand; as the gaze through the viewfinder; or as a (partial) body in relation to other bodies and to image and mirror surfaces. His practice undoes conventional roles and power relations between photographer and sitter – between the gazing subject and the object of desire – transforming his studio into a site of homoerotic longing.

Archive

In the Archive room, Sepuya offers a wide-ranging selection of ephemera from his personal collection, including early portraits of friends and lovers, self-made zines, magazine contributions, and handmade collages, alongside self-produced artist books. The seven issues of his zine SHOOT (2005–2008), from the collection of Fotomuseum Winterthur, foreshadow the early development of his studio-based practice: while the first issue centres on the model’s nudity, subsequent issues shift towards increasingly intimate scenes that bring the relationship between photographer and photographed into focus. The material on view underscores, on the one hand, the importance of Sepuya’s personal relationships and the formation of a social image archive, potentially reworked into fragments and collages. It also situates his practice within broader contexts, revealing image and textual references that register in Sepuya’s photographs as both visible and invisible traces.

Dark Room

In Sepuya’s work, Dark Room refers both to the photographic darkroom and to the low-lit site of queer desire in bars, clubs, and saunas, where, for example, gay men meet for anonymous sex; but also where encounters can become the beginning of friendships. The potential Sepuya ascribes to this in-between space is signalled by his work Exposure (2017): across five images, a photograph is shown in the process of its becoming, undermining photography’s specificity to fix its subjects – in this case, Sepuya himself.

The logic of the darkroom is also transposed into the studio, through the recurring arrangement of mirror, lens, and black fabric that Sepuya uses for portrait situations in his works titled Dark Room. It returns again in works where the artist links photographic materiality with his Black body, or where he uses red darkroom safelight and photographic blur to queer-code explicit acts without yielding them to the gaze, like in his Dark Room Studio series. In Sepuya’s Dark Room, darkness and Blackness become a possibility for seeing and desiring beyond established heteronormative and white norms.

Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated magazine, published by Spector Books in collaboration with the Sprengel Museum Hannover (German/English; designed by Good Enough, Berlin). Short texts contextualise and further explore Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s artistic practice. The publication includes an overview essay by Kobena Mercer and contributions by, among others, Lily Cho, Ronald Rose-Antoinette, and Taous Dahmani, as well as a conversation with the artist.